Is that Fred History or Sam History who made the judgement?
Wars merely prove who is stronger. Might doesn’t always make right. And I see no reason to kill some 600,000 of my fellow citizens over a political dispute.
the thread discusses moral disputes, the Civil War had at least one major moral dispute.
one answer to your persistent misunderstanding is that the federal government never deviated from its position that session was unlawful, numerous wartime laws and policies (e.g., the emacipation proclamation) adhered to this point.
the fact that the rebel governments proclaimed independence did not vindicate the claim or raise to legitimacy. **because they lost the war. ** in contrast, the american revolution required a battlefield victory before independence took on legality. so in some instances, might makes right.
furthermore, from
Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1868) a post-civil war supreme court decision that held that secession (here Texas) was “utterly without operation in law.”
"Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. "
the Alaska Supreme Court cited this in
Kohlhaas v. State (11/17/2006) sp-6072, 147 P3d 714 a 2006 decision, which disposed of some yahoo’s effort to remove alaska from the Union.
what more do you want? the question of secession is done with. secession fantasy time is over.
Not quite. Let’s try again: How can a man make a contract that his six-times great-granson cannot dissolve?
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you need to ask the question intelligently. “dissolving” a contract is very ambiguous, it can have several meanings that I can think of. nevertheless,
terms of an agreement – covenants --written into a grant deed “run with the land” if they meet certain criteria. they can and do go on for generations. e.g, a grant deed to a city with the restrictive convenant that the land only be used as a park.
terms of a commercial contract go on as long as the contract exists, indefinitely if there is no self-limiting clause. parties can agree to terminate the contract, and there are numerous ways of ending it through litigation. a party is free, under anglo-american law, to breach the contract if willing to pay monetary damages (in most cases the courts will not require specific performance). contracts with individuals end when the individual dies, but with entities, like corporations, the contracts can go on as long as the entity and its sucessors exist.
regarding the secession fantasy: if you were born a citizen of the United States, the law presumes that you assent to the law of the land. you can’t break the law and argue that you didn’t expressly agree to the penal code. you can, however, renounce your citizenship if you find the laws here onerous and move anywhere that would have you.
There is a hell of a big difference between thinking about it and doing it.
Let me suggest you try something. Get a copy of Thucidides’ The Pelloponesian War, a copy of Xenophon’s The Anabasis, and Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Add to that MacArthur’s memoirs, John George’s Shots Fired in Anger, Alfred Bellard’s Gone for a Soldier, and so on. Get every single first hand account of war written by men who actually saw the elephant, who killed other men in battle, and tell me if any of them even tries to address the question of what it feels like to kill another man.
There’s a reason for that. And believe me, you don’t want to know what it is.
I cannot imagine wanting to kill my fellow Americans for wanting to secede.
George MacDonald Fraser’s *Quartered Safe Out Here * (account of combat in Burma) and William Manchester’s *Goodbye Darkness * (Pacific War) address your question.
I don’t need to read any account of what it is like to “see the elephant”. I am the son of a Navy combat veteran of WW2, and the nephew of a Army cavalryman killed in the Philippines in 1942. I’ve heard the stories first hand. in my time I was an unrestricted line officer in the United States Navy, fully qualified in surface warfare. I thought long and hard about what duty might require and then decided I could do it. thank God this was during the Cold War.
don’t misquote or misrepresent what I’ve said, even indirectly. I didn’t say I’d kill anyone for wanting to secede. I said I would have done so in the event of an actual rebellion if duty required it.
and also the bills that have lately been going through congress.
